Institutional Experiment in Digital Learning

i2.002 Mechanics and Materials II is a junior level, required class in mechanical engineering at MIT.

i2.002 is one of the institutional experiments the MIT Council on Education Technology sponsored in 2011-2012 to integrate digital and online learning into MIT residential courses. One of the hopes was to encourage MIT departments to integrate these tools into their residential courses.

In Spring 2012, i2.002 was the first course to be offered concurrently online to MIT students located in remote locations around the world, as well as to students on the MIT campus. Remote students were required to complete the same problem sets (homework), labs and exams as local students. We recorded the lectures and made them available online, experimented with whiteboard capture, used online discussion forums and remote exam proctoring. And while the numbers were small, the remote students performed (slightly) better than the local students. More information can be found on the MITCET website.

In Spring 2013, we built on the course materials from 2012 to provide online videos indexed by concepts for students to locate specific topics of interest. And experimented with different formats to record lectures including digitized notes in sync with lecture audio (by recording notes from a digitizing tablet during the live lecture) as a means to find lower cost, and faster turnaround mechanisms to get lectures and example problems online. Our work was highlighted in a MIT News article, “A new wrinkle in online education“.